You likely have “autopilot” tasks in your personal life: washing the dishes, preparing spaghetti, or driving home from work in the evening.
You don’t think about the best way to do these things. You just do them the way you always have.
Sure, this frees up precious brain space for other tasks. But it also means you miss out on more efficient ways of completion that could save you time and energy.
On a personal scale, spending a few extra minutes on something isn’t a huge deal. But what about when you consider how much time or money you lose at your company on inefficient tasks or processes—from sending invoices to collecting signatures?
That’s where process intelligence comes in.
Process intelligence provides accurate information about what work exists, who completes it, how long it takes, and how automation could improve task completion and efficiency. This lets you identify bottlenecks and improve operational efficiency organization-wide.
Process intelligence helps you understand what’s happening today so you can plan for improvements tomorrow.
It’s automation with intentional planning and visibility.
Learn how process intelligence can help deliver process insights and drive continuous improvement across your business with our ebook, Demystifying process intelligence.
Process intelligence technology: Four primary solutions
Process intelligence tools utilize machine learning (ML) algorithms to collect event data, analyze information, and visualize processes. Four main technologies create an end-to-end solution for process intelligence:
- Process mining: These tools analyze event logs to help you understand and discover operational processes. They allow companies to see what users do across different systems and applications, such as their ERP and CRM software, as they interact with customers and each other. With this information, you can understand—and improve—how your business executes processes.
- Task mining: This technology allows companies to capture user (or desktop) interaction data so they can analyze how employees are getting work done. For example, a recorder bot might run in the background to allow the system to recognize when a user uses certain mouse clicks or keystrokes. Then, task mining software looks for patterns to reveal how people actually work, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies to target for improvement.
- Process modeling: Data collected through process and task mining helps organizations conduct process modeling to create a detailed picture of business processes and the stakeholders involved at each step. A technically-focused diagramming activity, process models document dependencies and interactions between systems, teams, and technologies involved in a business process. These complex diagrams help process experts conduct close analyses to find areas for improvement.
- Process mapping: A business-focused planning activity, process mapping lays out the activities and tasks needed to complete a business process. Compared to process models, process maps tend to be simpler and easier to consume, so everyday end users can pick them up and quickly identify what needs to happen next.
What are the benefits of process intelligence?
Many midmarket organizations eventually start to lose visibility into cross-functional processes and systems. Investing in process intelligence tools holds many advantages for these companies, such as:
1. Data-driven decision-making
Process intelligence collects and analyzes data from an organization’s processes, giving you the insights you need to make informed decisions.
“Without doing some form of process or task mining, it’s hard to know what’s really happening,” says Jay Tomlin, Senior Director of Product Management at Nintex. An organization can make more accurate and effective business decisions using real-time data rather than intuition or guesswork.
2. Accurate reporting on performance
With process intelligence software, you can measure how long a process takes (cycle time) and the cost of running the process once (total cost per process instance). This allows organizations to monitor performance, compare it against benchmarks, and identify areas for improvement.
3. Finding and eliminating inefficiencies
Process and task mining help companies pinpoint bottlenecks and delays in current processes. From there, you can model out a new automated process that addresses these issues, leading to smoother, more efficient operations.
For example, Coke Florida uses the full suite of Nintex products to ensure efficiencies across all manufacturing, sales, and distribution operations.
4. Identifying candidates for automation
Process intelligence platforms analyze which tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to human error, helping organizations decide what to automate next. Automating the most manual and error-prone tasks can also free up employees to work on more strategic activities.
5. Cost and time savings
Process intelligence helps you analyze processes and identify areas where you waste time and resources, helping identify where you can cut unnecessary expenditures and speed up production.
For example: Australia’s Port Stephens Council streamlines processes and saves time with Nintex Process Manager, resulting in an annual savings of over AUD $35,000.
Debunking common process intelligence myths
As the popularity of process intelligence rises, so do the number of myths about it. Let’s debunk the top three:
Myth #1: Process intelligence tools pry on sensitive user and enterprise data.
These tools anonymize and aggregate data to protect privacy, meaning that insights are derived from patterns and trends rather than individual information.
Most platforms follow robust security and governance standards, are GDPR and CCPA compliant, have data encryption standards, and also manage access to sensitive information to limited users.
Myth #2: Process intelligence tools don’t help businesses cut costs.
Despite the shift to more conservative and intentional SaaS spend, the average company has 23 redundant apps across their tech stack, resulting in inflated business costs and process inefficiencies spanning multiple tools.
Process intelligence tools help organizations identify those inefficiencies, understand where to make strategic spending cuts, and increase the ROI of their current software investments with automations and streamlined workflows.
Myth #3: Process intelligence is an additional expense; manual process discovery is more economical.
While it requires an initial investment, process intelligence software ultimately reduces operational costs by automating and accelerating process discovery.
Process intelligence tools help identify the highest ROI processes to automate, streamline process mapping, and significantly reduce automation implementation timelines.
How to implement process intelligence in your company
With the right tools and a mindset of continuous improvement, you can start seeing the benefits of process intelligence more quickly than you might think.
Here’s how to get started with process intelligence:
- Define your goals and objectives: With your team, decide what you want to accomplish with process intelligence. For example, you may want to see reduced costs or better compliance. Then, create specificity around your chosen objective, attaching a goal metric so you can track your progress.
- Choose a process intelligence platform: The software you select should not only let you complete tasks like process mapping and modeling but also identify opportunities to automate processes for improved efficiency. Look for a customizable, flexible, user-friendly tool with an intuitive interface. Nintex Process Manager, for example, empowers employees to identify, edit, and optimize complex processes.
- Collect and visualize data: Once you have selected your process intelligence tool, the rest should be easy. The provider you’ve chosen should help you with any installation and configuration questions. Then, you can start collecting data and modeling and mapping processes.
- Use insights to drive action: Interpret the insights uncovered by your process intelligence to prioritize process improvements and automate tasks. “You have to take the information that you gather—and your understanding of the process—and then take some action to make that process more efficient. That’s where automation can really help,” says Tomlin.
Pro tip: Join your process intelligence platform’s knowledge base or community to learn more about implementation best practices.
Process intelligence reveals insights into business processes
The speed at which a company can analyze, automate, and realize value is key to the success of its digital transformation initiative. Midmarket organizations that take an agile approach and constantly strive to optimize their business processes will have an edge over their competitors.
By combining data, analytics, and learning algorithms, process intelligence can help your company discover how to integrate existing business processes. It also helps you adopt a mindset of continuous improvement in your business—creating, testing, and implementing new versions of processes to help your organization accomplish more and create happier employees and customers.
Learn how process intelligence helps deliver process insights and drive continuous improvement across your business with Demystifying process intelligence.
